India’s bidi workers suffer for 1,000-a-day habit

Indian women sit with a basket filled with tobacco flakes and cotton thread, as they roll 'bidis' in Kannauj, some 200kms south-east of New Delhi.

Kannauj (India) (AFP) - Zainab Begum Alvi and her band of young helpers hunch over baskets filled with tobacco flakes and dried leaves, trying to roll a thousand dirt-cheap cigarettes a day at the behest of India's powerful bidi barons.

"I have to do it, no matter what, even if I'm not well. I have no other choice," says Alvi, who earns 70 rupees a day, a little over a dollar, for her 12 hours of toil hand-rolling the bidis.